


The Jägers' Mirror

by khilari



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Death, Gen, Halloween, Suicide, Supernatural - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-27 17:11:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8409871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khilari/pseuds/khilari
Summary: Bill and Barry return the day after Halloween to find two Jägers dead, one by mysterious means and one by his own hand.





	

Excerpted from Barry Heterodyne’s Diary:

**1st November**

Bill and I returned this morning to the news that two Jägers had died the night before, one by his own hand. Gkika indicated the other had been poisoned. The world will not suffer for two less Jägers in it, but they are ours, so Bill and I spent most of the day trying to revive them. We failed. Likely we will spend most of tomorrow trying to find out what happened to them.

**2nd November**

We started by asking Gkika what kind of poison and how a Jäger had been poisoned. It’s not impossible to poison a Jäger, they’re erratically immune to certain toxins not all of them, but they usually know how not to poison themselves. No one in Mechanicsburg would poison a Jäger deliberately. Bill suspects they’d been outside Mechanicsburg against his orders, especially when Gkika proved cagey.

According to Gkika they’d been boiling water containing Heterodyne herb cultivars and probably breathing in the steam. When pressed, though, she admitted those herbs had been amaranth and wormwood, which aren’t poisonous to breathe even in the Heterodyne cultivars. Confound it, why would she make up a story to cover them heading outside and then make it unbelievable?

Gkika was agitated. I hate it when they look afraid of us. Gkika’s so self-assured and then sometimes she looks at me as if I’m about to hit her. They didn’t look at our father that way.

**3rd November**

Gkika finally thought to tell us that there was a third Jäger involved in whatever nonsense this was! She didn’t think he was poisoned, but he was behaving strangely, so she decided she’d better have him checked over by us. I can’t believe it took three days to reach that decision!

With a live patient Bill pressed her harder on what the poison was. She indicated the “water” they’d used was some Sparky concoction stolen from the Castle. We pressed the Castle and it said if it paid attention to every stupid thing Jägers did it would have no time for anything else.

The patient was a dark green-brown, but otherwise looked almost human. I don’t think he can have been much over half a century, if that. His name was Tadas. When we entered the barracks to find him he was curled up in one of the beds. A lot of other Jägers — all much older, by the fur and horns — were hanging around nearby, but his eyes were closed and he was paying no attention to them. If it wasn’t for his ears, constantly twitching and flattening, I would have thought he was asleep.

“Tadas?” Bill said gently. “We need to check you for poison.”

Tadas’ eyes opened. They were orange, but you nearly couldn’t tell that, the pupil was dilated so much. I couldn’t tell if that was a symptom or just the nature of his eyes. He sat up and the expression on his face was… utter misery. He didn’t look frightened, or angry, or aggressive, just completely miserable and almost pleading. He started to hold his arm out and Bill reached forwards to draw blood. Tadas’ eyes flicked up and his muscles tensed, that was all the warning we had. Bill jumped back at the same moment I reached to grab him, a claw blurring through the air where he’d stood.

We stood back to back, weapons drawn, suspecting we’d been lured into a trap. But the other Jägers had grabbed Tadas, pulled him away from us, and were looking at us with that damned fear. I suppose we earned it that time, reacting as if we were in a hostile town. No, one of them attacked us, I think we were within our rights to react that way.

We had Tadas chained down so we could do the tests. He’s not poisoned. Funny thing, he seemed more relieved about the chains than anything.

**4th November**

We talked to Tadas and may have finally got to the bottom of this mystery. I’m going to transcribe it as best I can, B is Bill and T is Tadas. Tadas was in chains during this, he didn’t seem to mind. Dionisie is the Jäger who died of, possibly, poison. Gavril killed himself.

B: Why did you attack me?  
T: I’m sorry.  
B: That’s not what I asked.  
T: The Master… the old Master, he wanted…  
Me: Our father? Saturn?  
T: Yah.  
B: You’ve known he wanted us dead for a decade. Why act on it now?  
T: He came back.  
B: (looking at me) He can’t possibly. The Three Prometheans pronounced him past revivification, and that was…  
Me: A long time ago.  
T: His ghost.  
(We both stared at him.)  
B: His ghost. At Halloween?  
(I hadn’t even thought of the date. Halloween has never been a big thing in Mechanicsburg, although nowadays they put it on for the tourists.)  
T: He killed Dionisie. (T turned away, probably trying to hide tears, and twitched his hands against the chains. I think he wanted to wipe his eyes, not escape. Something clicked.)  
Me: You, Dionisie and Gavril. My father made you all.  
T: Yes.  
Me: Were you trying to talk to him?  
T: Yes.  
Me: Why?  
(T looked at the floor and refused to answer. Bill could have ordered him to, but chose not to.)  
B: Tell me what you did.  
T: We took the herbs and put them in water.  
B: Special water?  
T: …Yes. Special.  
B: Why?  
T: It felt like he would be closer.  
B: Then what?  
T: We put the pot of herbs on a fire. Put up a mirror and lit candles, let them burn ‘til we had wax and splashed that on the mirror. Carved Master Saturn’s name in the wax and splashed the mirror with blood.  
B: Whose blood?  
T: …huh? Our blood. What else?  
B: Okay, good. Then what?  
T: The Master came. He was so angry. We thought… thought he’d still like us… (T starts to cry.) He was crazy, bad crazy. Told us we were weak and useless, obeying you. Said only Vole… (T swallows.) Said we should avenge him. Dionisie said, you didn’t do it. Didn’t kill him. Nothing to avenge. Then he just fell over. The Master killed him. Said he’d chosen us, we were traitors to him, the Heterodyne line was better gone than…  
B: Than represented by us. (B was pale by now. I expect I was too.)  
T: Yah. I’m sorry. I didn’t want him to hate me. Gavril wouldn’t choose…  
B: And you’ve chosen to kill us.  
T: No! I don’t want to.  
B: Then don’t. You’ve stuck with us so far, even from the beginning, when I know I wasn’t the Heterodyne you would have hoped for. We couldn’t have taken Mechanicsburg without the help of the Jägerkin.  
T: You don’t hate us?  
B: I don’t know what to do with you, any of you, but I don’t hate you.

I asked Bill later if he’d meant that. He sighed and said he didn’t know. I don’t know whether I could say it and mean it, either, but I hated to see how miserable Tadas was all the same.

**5th November**

Bill and I both slept badly and felt a presence that wasn’t the Castle. Considering we’ve slept fine since our return I think I can put that down to imagination. Our father ranting at Jägers for not killing us, even if it would end the Heterodyne line, is sadly plausible. Probably it was imagination for them, as well, combined with the effects of breathing in steam from whatever Spark concoction they stole. A silly Halloween ritual among some younger Jägers that went badly wrong.

We convinced Tadas to tell us what area of the tunnels the ritual had been performed in and retrieved and fumigated the bloody mirror with sage before burying it. Both of us feel foolish for it. All the same, it will be more of a relief than usual to leave Mechanicsburg this time.


End file.
